Buggy releases are, unfortunately, nothing new. But it isn’t every day that a game company comes out and apologizes for launching a messy product.

JoWood has issued a formal apology for the state of Gothic 3: Forgotten Gods. Given that two patches are out already, and the game is still in bad shape, it must be in really bad shape.

What I find amazing in their statement is the remark that the game was released this year because “we and the community wanted it.”

Really? JoWood wanted to release a game they knew was unfinished? They believed the gamers wanted a game that was riddled with defects? And that after what happened with the earlier Gothic?

Or was it just that JoWood thought they could slip this in and pick up some bucks from the usual Christmas rush? When a game has a fan base, it can usually be counted on to sell before the bad news gets around.

In the meantime, if you were considering Forgotten Gods, you may do well to forget it for the foreseeable future. The way things are, it’s likely the game will need more than a third patch.

Why does that corporate weaselspeak remind me of George Bernard Shaw’s line “Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!” We want to release the game (to make some quick bux), therefore our long-suffering suckers, er, valued customers do, too.

I have heard that for Gothic IV they have moved the programming to Mumbai, not using the German and Austrian coders from Pyranha Bytes.

GTA IV isn’t limiting the number of installs, which has been my biggest complaint of Securom. To be honest, I haven’t noticed any problems with Securom. I have had it on my system since I bought Bioshock the day of release before I knew about the new DRM features of Securom that limited installs. King’s Bounty also uses it but only for a DVD check.

I seem to recall the other Gothic titles having similar bug issues. It will be interesting to see if the change of developers will help. Although, in most cases I suspect the issue is the publishers pushing and having the final say on the go live date more than it is the developers. In any case they shouldn’t release something so buggy just ‘casue “that was what we and the community desire” Fans are like 8-year olds, sometime you have to say no even when you don’t want to.

I’ve never had issues with any DRM. But nobody has ever broken into my house either. That I’ve been lucky doesn’t mean I wont do my best to avoid both. Personally I think there should be a law that says effectively: The driver is to run a hardware device (dvd drive) and nobody but the manufacture of the device or the OS will put any software in that stack. They can use the device (obviously) but they can’t interfere with how it works. If that law existed, then they could get as draconian with DRM as they wanted and I wouldn’t really care. I might still avoid the product, but I wouldn’t consider it unethical.

I think there is a couple factors in play. It seems to me that people have become too impatient, and every delay in a promised release date brings a storm of negative comments. I would rather wait for a finished and polished product myself. The other thing is the rush to get it out the door for the Christmas rush. I think that is a mistake. Too many things are released all at once. A friend that is an FPS fan was just commenting on how much he had to play with Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and others all releasing in the same time period. He ended up only buying two of them where if they had spread the releases out over the course of the year he would probably have got them all. If a game is good it really doesn’t matter when it’s released. Oblivion had a spring release and it was one of the top selling games of 2006. It still wasn’t perfect, but better than if they had tried to rush it out the door in November 2005.

I don’t really mind a single online authentication that much, and GTA is even allowing you to do it from another computer besides the one you have installed it on. I still think there should be a phone in option as well if you have no way at all to get an Internet connection. Windows XP allows you to do that to activate it.

I see where Amazon has not opened reviews for GTA4 PC until it’s released.